Do Justice. No Really.

Over the last few weeks there is one verse that has been recurring in my thoughts and in my heart and in my soul. It’s been bubbling up like volcanic lava.

Micah 6:8 says,

He [God] has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

This verse. This one verse is tearing me up. It is chasing me down and it emerges under every rock, every conversation, every reading, and every time I consider this world.

Over the last couple of weeks I have been wrestling with issues of race. It’s so hard. My brother is a police officer and one of my closes friends is too. They are unjustly portrayed by this world. There is real systemic racism that is unjust and innocent people are dying as a result. Too many leaders in the church want to simply brush it under the rug. We don’t want to be unsupportive of police, because they risk their lives to protect us. We want to rally around them and love them well. We also see the injustice that is facing our black brothers and sisters. We are coming to grips with the reality that Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr was right when he said, “An injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere.”

It’s October and it is Domestic Violence Awareness month. This hits close to home because my cousin is a survivor and advocate. Inside of the homes around us women, children, and men are being abused emotionally and physically. Every day there are headlines of another family murdered by one of the adults in the home.

I sat down recently to read a book that a friend gave me. She said that I absolutely needed to read this book. That we as the people of God need to figure out how to respond to the crisis that is described within its pages. The book was called, The Slave Across the Street. It’s the story of Theresa Flores. She suffered human trafficking as a sex slave at the hands of evil men in Birmingham, MI. Her story is horrific. What is more horrific is that her story is becoming common. According to a congressional finding 100,000–300,000 children are at risk of commercial sexual exploitation in the United States (pg. 151). According to Dr Richard Estes, “Tens of thousands of U.S., Mexican, and Canadian children and youth become victims of juvenile pornography, prostitution, and trafficking every year. (pg. 151)” This problem cuts across ethnic and socio-economic barriers. Nobody is immune.

So what do we do? How do we respond? There is injustice everywhere. There is pain everywhere. There is evil, not some mystic spiritual evil, real evil in our world. What can we do? How do we do justice?

If you’re at all like me you feel almost paralyzed by the fear, anger, and sadness. More and more there is a rage that builds within me as I learn about this broken world. I feel like Neo from the Matrix films. It is as if I have been unplugged from a fantasy land only to enter into “the real.”

“The real” is filled with pain and sorrow and evil and injustice. For the Christian we are called, no, we are commanded to do justice. We do not have the luxury of simply ignoring the injustice in the world. God has commanded us to enter in and do justice.

The thing is, there’s just so much to do. There’s so much injustice in this world it feels like we are storming the gates of Hell with squirt guns.

Our first step is to pray. We beseech God to act swiftly. We ask him to wake us from our slumber to see the injustice that is happening all around us.

Our second step is to learn. We need to learn about what people are already doing to fight the injustice. We need to learn about the problem and try to understand it.

Our third step is to act. We take action by getting involved with others who are fighting injustice.

I suppose at the end of the day the big question is, will we live in disobedience to this command to do justice or will we be ambassadors for Christ to a broken world?